ABSTRACT
More than ten years after the Dutch social partners concluded the now famous Accoord of Wassenaar (1982), the term poldermodel was coined to describe the achievements of the cooperation of the framework on socioeconomic policy between unions, employers' organizations and the government. The Accoord fits a more general pattern: relative to most other countries, consensus is a prevailing approach in the Netherlands, as d'Iribarne (1989) stressed in his comparative study of factories in the United States of America, France and the Netherlands. The Accoord sought to limit wage rises and regulate the supply and demand of labour, but Visser and Hemerijck (1997) also stress that a third element should not be overlooked: the fact that the elaborate social security system was also reformed, and in fact, downsized.
